Music: Echo and the Bunnymen back with new album, tour

By Jay N. Miller/For The Patriot Ledger

Saturday

Nov 17, 2018 at 2:16 AM

Echo and the Bunnymen have always been a band that seemed to delight in upending expectations. Forming in 1978 in the Liverpool area at the height of the punk rock era, they leavened their music with pop melodies and singer Ian McCulloch's poetic imagery. That got them labeled as "postpunk" rockers and began a career that has continued – with a break here and there – for four decades of their own fiercely independent music.

2018 has been no different, as the Bunnymen released "The Stars, The Oceans, and The Moon" back in September, and it is a new/old work. Essentially, the band took some of their best and most beloved songs and re-worked and re-interpreted them with new arrangements and a bunch of guests. There are some subtle string arrangements with the London Session Orchestra, some horn charts, and nice additions like accordion and cello. But it isn't as if longtime fans won't recognize their favorite tunes, as they are basically the same, just enhanced and expanded on this CD, their 18th album.

Echo and the Bunnymen will be headlining Boston's Orpheum Theater on Tuesday, November 20.

We caught up with Bunnymen guitarist Will Sergeant from his London-area home as he was re-classifying some of the new vinyl records he'd bought on the band's European tour, on a short break before their United States tour began.

Sergeant and McCulloch and bassist Les Pattinson were the original members of the group, which used a drum machine initially. Their 1980 debut album "Crocodiles" hit the Top 20 charts in the United Kingdom, and started them on their way. The "Porcupine" albnum in 1983 reached the #2 spot on those U.K. charts and led to a string of hits, like "Lips Like Sugar," "The Killing Moon," and "Bring On the Dancing Horses." The band had fallen apart in 1993 but got together again with the three original members four years later. While Pattinson retired in '98, the Bunnymen have continued unabated since then with McCulloch and Sergeant still crafting the new music and fronting various touring musicians.

The concept of revisiting the past is not new to the Bunnymen as in 2011 they toured while playing music from their first two albums. If anything, the new record offers a more introspective look at their best work, a chance to hear the words and melodies in new settings. Oddly enough – although not for this band – the new tour does not feature those new arrangements, as Sergeant explained.

"We wanted to put out some interesting things for our 40th anniversary," said Sergeant. "That was the idea at the time and Mac was really the glue on the vision front – he had the whole concept. These new versions are not too similar to the originals but not radically different. It was just a case of us asking ourselves 'What can we do with that?' and then seeing what we could come up with in the studio. Mac had a lot of the ideas already, such as taking our song 'Angels and Devils' from its original 4/4 rock tempo and turning it into a waltz, which works very well. It was a pretty interesting process and in today's studios, you can do pretty much anything now. There are a couple songs that really have a different sound – like 'Bedbugs and Ballyhoo' – but for the most part, I still play what I always play on these songs.

"We haven't really been doing these new versions live so strings and so on haven't been needed," Sergeant added. "This is album I believe is meant to be listened to in your house, and in a live situation we go back to the original arrangements. I know in a live concert, I want to rock out and these new versions are a bit mellow for that.

"Now when we play live, we naturally ex––pand a lot of the songs we do," Sergeant noted. "We find a way to expand them and improvise on them. It turns out that's the way many of them evolve and that becomes the way we like them best. None of the songs on the new album have ever really gone out of our set lists, so playing them is normal. Making this album was an experience and a case where we were all willing to go for it, follow what Mac was doing and thinking and find something new in them. But in concert? We're still more 'the old crash and bang.' These new versions might be too cerebral to work in concert and we just felt we should be doing the more rocking versions."

There are surely not many bands still vibrant and popular enough to tour worldwide after 40 years and Sergeant appreciates his good fortune.

"Yes, I can't hardly believe it myself," he said, "considering we started it all for a laugh and it wasn't meant as anything serious. Everybody was in bands back then. It was the thing you did. Mac came around to my house with some songs and I had a drum machine and we were just having fun. It went from there. We were very basic at first, with the drum machine, just a few simple tunes. We got to play out a bit and people liked it. We discovered we had a fan with ties to Sire Records and they said they'd sign us if we got a drummer. We had decided we wanted one by then anyway, so we said 'OK.' It's pretty amazing what's happened since then.

"I think our sound has naturally evolved, simply because we've become better musicians," Sergeant said with a laugh. "Obviously there are more embellishments now and we keep tinkering to try to keep it sounding fresh, but I think it's still the same basic sound Mac and I had when we began."